Eclipse Phase: Sexy

I'm A Banana · Aug 13, 2009

Sexy Game is Sexy

This is a new game being released at Gen Con apparently "Brought to you by the people who were the driving force behind the changes made with Shadowrun, Fourth Edition." It has me kind of excited for a few reasons, from an industry and design perspective:

There's three main things that kind of grab my attention as kind of awesome and new and fun.

#1:

The ability to switch your body at will, from genetically-modified transhumans to synthetic robotic shells, optimizing your character for specific missions.

Sci-fi trappings aside, this is a big answer to the problem of getting bored with character abilities. 4e tries to solve the problem through retraining, and I'm still kind of struggling with an FFZ solution, but EP has it on the money: I can be someone totally different for each adventure, but have a steadily maintained character personality. This is effin' stellar.

#2:

"The ability to back up your character’s mind and be restored from backup in the case of death--a built-in system of “save points” and functional immortality."

Similar to the above, but solving the problem of character death. 4e just tries to not kill you very often (and provides easy resurrection when you can die), FFZ has Safe Crystals, and EP has boot-able characters. I like the trend.

#3:

We encourage people to play in our sandbox. We want our players and fans to share the game with their friends, write fan fiction, create websites for their campaigns, post their house rules online, publish netbooks based on their personalized settings, create crossover systems for running Eclipse Phase using other published (or home-brewed) rules sets, or even mesh Eclipse Phase with other favored crossover worlds. To this end, we've published the Eclipse Phase RPG under a Creative Commons license. Details on how this license works, and any exceptions that apply, are noted below.
...
Eclipse Phase products (including printed rulebooks/sourcebooks and PDFs) are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License

OH SNAP OGL++! This includes a huge chunk (but not all) of the artwork, and all the text.

The system is apparently percentile skills-based, and seems to be emphasizing flexibility (claims you can do a lot of different kinds of adventures with it, so it's not optimized for combat or social skills or whatever), so that doesn't get my blood pumping too hard, but the fact that everything is CC, and those two character-ability and character-death related tricks above get me pretty excited.

Sexy stuff. Anyone thinking of picking this up at Gen Con? Anyone care to post tidbits to the boards, or a review? Anyone else pumped about these ideas in the game, and hoping to yoink the concepts for your fantasy game of choice?

Crothian · Aug 13, 2009

That looks pretty sweet. Thanks for linking that!

Fallen Seraph · Aug 13, 2009

I've been waiting a year for this game to come out. I can't wait till I can finally get my hands on it, alas I have to wait since not going to be at Gen Con.

Lakashim · Aug 13, 2009

They have 100 books for GenCon. 25 being sold each day.

No word on when it will be in stores though.

Pic of the book at GenCon;

http://twitpic.com/do6mc

Doug McCrae · Aug 13, 2009

That is brilliant. Back in the mid-90s I played in a home-brewed game we called the Dream Game, which solved both those problems in a similar way. I remember being really impressed by the way the game-universe provided the justification to fix game issues.

In the Dream Game the PCs had a small number of powers based on the players' dreams. (Players who couldn't remember their dreams had powers based on word association.) The game revolved around going into a patient's ~~dungeon~~ dreams to fix mental problems caused by intruding demons or ghosts. If your dream avatar died you lost your powers but were sent back in as a 'dream virgin' with no memory of what had happened up to that point. You got a new set of powers next adventure, once you'd had a chance to have more dreams.

Fallen Seraph · Aug 13, 2009

Here is the opening fiction for it: http://eclipsephase.com/downloads/eclipsephase_preview2_fictionlack.pdf

Here is a sample character: http://www.eclipsephase.com/sites/default/files/mercurialscavenger_1.jpg

AngryMojo · Aug 13, 2009

It looks cool. I think I may have another book going on my "Shelf of Systems"

darjr · Aug 13, 2009

It does look cool, and I like the ideas and premise.

Hjorimir · Aug 13, 2009

I've had my eye on this for a little while now. I'll be interested to see what people think once they pick it up at GenCon.

Umbran · Aug 13, 2009

Well, perhaps I'm the only person who doesn't like the "can just go ahead and restat" sort of thing.

But then, I don't see changing characters out to be much of a problem. a character should have a beginning, a middle, and an end. After the end, it is time to go on to something else, someone new in more than just what they can do tactically.